Behind the scenes of digitisation at Wadham Library

In 1511, German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer carved a series of woodcuts. Almost two and half centuries later, they came into the possession of Richard Warner, a botanist who had studied at Wadham. When Warner died in 1775, the woodcuts – eight plates and a series of poems that depict the Passion of the Christ in intricate detail – were left to the College, where they remain today.

For most of those 250 years, the only way for anyone to look at the woodcuts was to travel to Oxford, where Wadham’s librarian would pull the volume from the stacks and set it down in front of them.

Then, in July this year, the Dürer woodcuts left Wadham for the first time since the 1700s when a digital copy was published online through Digital Bodleian. In 2026, anyone with an internet connection can look in detail at the carvings.

As Wadham celebrates the first of its special collections to be published on Digital Bodleian, we ask: how can we create archives that are fit for the future?

Digital Bodleian was launched in 2015. The platform is an online treasure trove hosting over 1.4 million images of over 21,000 items in more than 200 languages. The oldest go back to 800 BC; the most recent come from our own century. Most of the material originates in the Bodleian’s own collections, but increasingly Oxford colleges are also making use of the platform to host their own material.

Given the almost three-thousand-year history of the material held by the Bodleian, it’s striking that it’s only in the past twenty-five years that the library’s collections have been available in digital form.

“The Bodleian has been digitising in various ways since the advent of digital photography in the 1990s,” says Tim Dungate, Digitization and Digital Engagement Manager at the Bodleian.

But it’s only in the past few years that technology has evolved to be able to capture items at a very high resolution.

In fact, John Barrett, studio manager and senior photographer at the Bodleian’s Imaging Studio, argues that we can now capture items in almost perfect detail.

“We think of digitisation as a kind of digital facsimile – it’s as perfect a copy as we can possibly make,” says Barrett. “And I don’t think we could have done that five years ago.”

Much of the material hosted by Digital Bodleian is captured at the Bodleian’s Imaging Studio, a quiet, low-lit basement tucked away under the Weston Library on Broad Street. The studio has eight photographic bays where photographers work year-round.

The projects they work on are funded externally by donors and charitable bodies. Items are selected by Bodleian curators and college librarians in conversation with funders, and material is captured with longevity in mind: the platform is ‘future-proofed’, so that, however technology develops, the material will still be accessible.

This means that, for the first time in human history, treasures from libraries and archives across the world are becoming freely available online to a professional standard, and will be far into the future.

“Making these originals public, making them available to all, is a really amazing thing,” says Barrett.

Digital Bodleian is part of a wider global movement. Many major institutions across the world, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, work to the same international standards (the IIIF), which mean that material is more easily accessible. The audience for the Bodleian’s material is also global: over 80% of users of Digital Bodleian come from outside the UK.

This means that Wadham’s Dürer, which for 250 years has only been accessible to scholars and researchers that could reach our small corner of Oxford, is now (virtually) travelling the world. But why does this matter?

Digitisation makes our shared past accessible to more people.

Making items freely available online means removing barriers for those who can’t travel to far-flung archives, whether for financial, health or logistical reasons. Meanwhile, we can all benefit from expanded knowledge: we may be more likely to make new discoveries and connections between items that are hundreds or thousands of years old when more trained eyes are on them.

In the era of digitisation, teachers across the world can now use digital versions of fragile archival material in their teaching. This means that students who would not previously have been able to engage with medieval mansuscripts or Renaissance portraits can now have access to them, which is particularly resonant for the kind of tutorials and access programmes that we hold at Wadham.

Meanwhile, there are major benefits for the material. Encouraging researchers to access a fragile item digitally reduces the risk of damage from handling.

Digitisation also captures an item at a particular moment in time. This ‘future-proof’ snapshot is a useful reference that can guard against theft or serve as a record if the original was ever damaged.

“It’s a security document,” says Wadham librarian Tim Kirtley. “If anything untoward happened, like fire or theft, we have the document preserved.”

Throughout history archival images or records have helped owners recover lost or stolen items, from art appropriated by the Nazis to Durham University’s stolen First Folio. Creating new high-quality digital versions will make valuable items even more secure.

The growing move towards digitisation is part of a digital era that is not without detractors. In recent years we have seen a growing clamour to reclaim the analogue: physical books, hard copies of magazines, vinyl albums and in-person spaces.

Some argue that accessing a digital copy is no substitute for holding an item in your hands. These items are objects that can only be fully appreciated in living, breathing reality, not least because of details that may escape digital capture.

Tim Kirtley understands this view. “These items are really inspirational as objects,” he says. “They’re museum-worthy, and yet you can sit there and turn the page. You can’t hope to get that unless you come along to the institution.”

But digitisation does not need to be at odds with the analogue. There is a hybrid approach which recognises the benefits of both and looks for ways to bring them together, while also thinking critically about what is digitised and why.

At Wadham, Tim has started to think about how to hold exhibitions which display the physical object while allowing visitors to swipe through and zoom in on the digital version in the same room.

These kinds of exhibitions could make it possible for visitors to look through items in a way they haven’t been able to before. It would mean, for example, being able to see elements like script, bindings, and inks in person while also accessing more detail on screen.

“If we could have a few manuscripts out in the room, and a few digital versions, it could really open up the physical experience in a very interactive way,” says Tim.

Digitisation also means that we can better unravel the histories of objects. Now that Wadham’s Dürer is online, for example, we can compare it to other versions, and piece together the history of how these woodcarvings evolved.

Since publication of the Dürer, Tim and the library team are excited about the potential to capture even more of the Library’s holdings.

Wadham’s collections are remarkably rich, and many have unique Wadham connections. One broadside issued by King Charles II in 1660 lists the names of those condemned to death for the execution of his father and includes the names of two Wadham men: Nicholas Love, a judge (he escaped to Switzerland), and John Cook, a recently-commissioned portrait of whom hangs in the SCR (he was not so lucky; he was hung, drawn and quartered a few months later).

Four centuries closer to home is a 1936 issue of BBC Listener magazine containing the earliest known usage of the word Kafkaesque. The term was coined by Wadham alumnus C. Day-Lewis, whose copy of the first English-language edition of Kafka’s The Trial is also among the Library’s collections.

Given Wadham’s historical connection to the Royal Society, there are also strong holdings in the history of science, including Robert Hooke’s micrographia, manuscripts from Newton and Linnaeus, and even an herbarium with fresh plant cuttings. And, of course, there’s Shakespeare’s First Folio.

The potential to share and protect these collections is huge, and Wadham is fortunate to be working with the Bodleian, which has a world-leading reputation in digitisation and in the use of digital technology. “The University has big ambitions for digitisation,” says Dungate.

Each digitisation project has a cost, and Digital Bodleian, along with librarians and colleges, works closely with donors and curators to select material for each project.

Tim Kirtley hopes that the Dürer digitisation will be the beginning of a long journey towards future-proofing Wadham’s collections, which together tell a story that is so unique to the college.

Engaging with objects from outside our lifetime leaves a deep impression on those who work with them, librarians, photographers, and students alike.

Bodleian photographer John Barrett remembers capturing a 15th century Book of Hours. “The skill is incredible, the painting is wonderful. You can imagine someone spending an awful lot of time on it. We’ve sort of lost that skill of being patient – accepting that it might take several days to finish one page,” he says. “It’s a totally different philosophy than we have now.”

That, in essence, is the beauty of the archive: transporting us to a time before our own. Through digitisation, Wadham can play its own small part in making this experience possible for more people across the world – all from our own small corner of Oxford.